Category Archives: Gaming

After ‘Mr.Robot’ the perfect hacking TV serial, now a perfect hacking game with “real hacking” Hacknet

Don’t actually want to hack but at the same time interested in hacking? Well, now there are hacking games for that uncertain feeling. Hacknet is the latest, and it has a lot of stimulating promises and not least that you will be doing “real hacking”. This fundamentally means that Hacknet uses terminal and genuine UNIX commands and would not appear like the type of hacking usually carried out in hip 1990 films by neon-haired teenagers.

Developed by Team Fractal Alligator, an Australian one-man studio, Hacknet is “an immersive, terminal-based hacking simulator for PC.”

Here’s the official promotional trivial:

Dive down a rabbit hoIe as you follow the instructions of a recently deceased hacker, whose death may not have been the accident the media reports. Using old school command prompts and real hacking processes, you’ll solve the mystery with minimal hand-holding and a rich world full of secrets to explore.

Bit, a hacker responsible for creating the most invasive security system on the planet, is dead. When he fails to reconnect to his system for 14 days, his failsafe kicks in, sending instructions in automated emails to a lone user. As that user, it’s up to you to unravel the mystery and ensure that Hacknet-OS doesn’t fall into the wrong hands.

Exploring the volatile nature of personal privacy, the prevalence of corporate greed, and the hidden powers of hackers on the internet, Hacknet delivers a true hacking simulation, while offering a support system that allows total beginners get a grasp of the real-world applications and commands found throughout the game.

Hacknet releases on the Humble Store and Steam on August 12. For those who are not familiar with hacking or the hacking game genre, this promises to be helpful and might even end up learning something.

Check out the trailer in video form, which makes it look more worthy than just a cursory glance:

If you are a gaming enthusiast, you would have played GTA V numerous times till now. But, some of you might have missed the fun as you laptop isn’t powerful enough to run a game like that. So, what do you need to do? Well, upgrading your hardware is an option, but here’s another way to enjoy the game.

A developer named Dominic Szablewski, who has made an app called Instant Webcam in the past, utilized the same technique to stream a game to any web browser. He writes on his blog post that it works “way better than it should.”

This open-source program is called jsmpeg-vnc and you can download it for free. This small program encodes the 60fps captured screen into an MPEG1 video. After it, all you need to do is to use the web browser on some other device. jsmpeg-vnc is a small Windows application written in C and it also takes input from your mouse and keyboard.

This app uses ffmped for encoding, libwebsockets for the WebSocker server and jsmpeg in the browser. The resulting jsmpeg-vnc program is published under the GPLv3 License.

So, using this program, you can use your PC and play your favorite games in the browser with minimal lag. This program is just a local network tool only, so you shouldn’t worry about the network congestion.

This tool works on any browser, in all devices. In the video, you can see the developer playing the GTA V game in his iPhone at 648×480 in phone’s browser.